Biggest and Smallest Cats

We have a fascination with extremes. Maybe we are bored. Extremes provide excitement, something different. And so, the world's largest or biggest cat is a source of interest for many. People also like nice clean, black and white answers. Unfortunately almost everything in life is gray!

People searching for the world's biggest cat are probably searching for one individual cat that is the biggest. That cat is probably a man made liger calledHercules. A liger is a lion to tiger hybrid. People are also fascinated with creating different cat breeds etc. Hercules weighs about 900 lbs and frankly he looks overweight and flabby but he is certainly enormous; an animal from the age of dinosaurs.

But the world's biggest cat could also mean the world's biggest cat species. That would be the tiger and particularly the tiger subspecies, the Siberian or Amur tiger. Or perhaps people are looking for the biggest domestic cat breed. That would be a wildcat hybrid called a Savannah cat but it would have to be a first filial (F1). The biggest individual domestic cat in the world isMAGIC and she truly is a magical cat.

Other large domestic cats are the Maine Coon (all domestic, no wild blood) and the Ragdoll. These are called "substantial" in cat fancy language. But we should remember that not all Maine Coons are big.

If we are talking about the world's biggest our wondering minds probably turn to the smallest too. There is no official world's smallest cat mainly because the Guinness World Records people decided to stop that category because people were overdoing it in trying to breed very small cats to the detriment of the cat's health.

The world's smallest cat breed is the Singapura not the dwarf cats. The dwarf cats are normal sized except for the leg length. The world's smallest wildcat is the rusty-spotted cat and amongst that species there will be one individual cat that is right now wondering around the forest in India that is the world's smallest individual cat. No one knows where she is and thank heavens for that.